


somewhere warm and waterless

by raycats



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Animal Instincts, Canon Compliant, F/F, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Memory Loss, Motherhood, Predator/Prey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-24 13:10:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16175735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raycats/pseuds/raycats
Summary: The Huntress makes an astonishing discovery: a child, close to death, has somehow wandered into her forest from beyond the fog. Hazy memories of a lost former life resurface, and an ancient, feral instinct compels her to intervene. But her strained efforts to provide care are inadequate, and the baby soon begins to wither away. Not wanting another child to be ripped from her arms by the claws of death, Anna becomes desperate to stop the inevitable, knowing that the Entity will not ignore the issue for long before calling upon her to hunt for it again. When she senses heartbeats within her territory, she comes to the realization that the only way the child can be saved is with cooperation from the most unlikely source: her prey.





	somewhere warm and waterless

**Author's Note:**

> The prose in this fic is intentionally choppy and blunt to convey the way I interpret the Huntress— I see her as mostly feral, with a lot of her humanity forgotten or just flat-out discarded by the Entity without her knowledge to fit its needs. I think that she is largely instinct-driven and one of the more monstrous killers. There isn't a lot of human left in her, except for one part, and I wondered how that might change things for her if she were to encounter something strange in the nightmare. Something that would make her question whether or not she wants to obey the Entity. Something like, you know, a little baby. And Meg, too, because I am really excessively fond of this pairing and all of the messy, tangled mother issues that come along with it. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

Anna knows the forest. Sharp smells that clear her head and call to her like a beacon. Needled texture beneath her feet. Chorus of the wind flowing through the grass. The still guard of the trees, blue with cold. Mud sucking at her feet, pulling her to the earth. Urge of the hunt, hot-blooded and thunderous and hers, if she'll take it. And rain. Always rain.  
  
The forest does not change. Before the rain, there were snowy winters she cannot forget, and she cannot forget the hunger that came with them, either, although it has been an eternity since the Voice had relieved her of the need to ever eat again. Hunger that never stopped. Hunger that ate her body to the bone, more and more every passing year. Winters with blackened fingers. Ribs like an arrangement of sticks in a bag of linen. The dully bitter of taste of brown, dead leaves turning to paste on her tongue, trying to work up enough saliva to stem the hunger. Forgetting what _soft_ felt like. Contract and release of a desperate arrow. Her arms shook; prey had fled. Mincing sawdust to fill the stomach. Throwing up the first real meal in memory. The incredible capacity for cruelty in humans in time of worst need. Learning how something can still be taken from nothing. Her mother's heart beneath Anna's ear, the only warm thing in the endless white isolation.  
  
The Voice has whispered away the snow. Anna does not miss it. But in its place is a rain that does not stop. The isolation remains; the isolation is always there.  
  
Without the hunger, the call of the hunt is merely a pattern of instinct, a path well-worn in spirals. The Voice asks her to hunt. She hunts, because that is what she does. She hunts, even though the meat will never again touch her lips. Even though she will never be hungry again. She hunts.  
  
There are other hunters beyond the fog. Anna does not know how many. She does not go near them, and they do not come to her forest. It is her territory; she stalks the edges repetitively, over and over endlessly, until she senses an intruder. And then she does what she must do with intruders, and they stay away, for a while, and she resumes her patrol.  
  
Sleep is no longer needed, but Anna still sleeps. That, too, is instinct. Sleep is the clarity needed to continue the stalk. To ensnare the prey. She is good at it. It quiets the Voice and lulls it to sleep for a time, but she knows that it cannot ever be truly sated. She knows it because she knows hunger, the way it burrows into the very essence of your being.  
  
In return for her indefinite labor, the Voice has given Anna her forest, for forever. She will never need to leave, and she doesn't want to. The cabin with its disintegrating wallpaper and rotted-through floors is her shelter, but the forest is her home. Her body is its body. They exist in harmony; they can sing to one another for all eternity, and they do. Anna protects the forest, and the forest protects Anna. The forest is mother, and mother is God. 

   
  


A cry from the fog.  
  
It scatters the crows. Anna snuffs out the candle at the window between her pinched fingers and leans out into the rain. It leaks through the veil and runs down behind her mask, into her eyes. But she does not need her eyes. The Voice had blackened them a lifetime ago, whittling her remaining senses into weapons.  
  
Ears twitch; nostrils flutter.  
  
Another cry.  
  
Anna picks up the scent. Faint, but obvious. It smells like a memory, and nothing like the forest.  
  
She hauls herself through the window in a nimble way that belies her great height. The moment her heels hit the packed earth, she begins running. Long, loping strides, a sudden urgency flooding hot deep inside of her gut, begging her to notice it. Her feet beat a path through the trees and carry her past the obstacles in her way— dormant generators, rain-slicked boulders. As she bounds through the mist, the scent gets stronger.  
  
It is not an intruder. Not prey for the Voice. No.  
  
A howl lances the rain.  
  
She knows it. A sound buried elbow-deep in her abdomen, gripping her by the heart. No, not prey.  
  
When Anna finds the source of the call, in a clearing shielded from the moon by trees, her heart goes still, and she feels a stirring of a long-forgotten emotion, one she had allowed instinct to discard: astonishment.  
  
There is a child here. It is of indeterminate age, but it's small— too small to be left alone in this way. It is sitting in the grass, crying, and when it sees her, its arms raise up towards her with a desperate wail that deafens her like a clap of thunder.  
  
A child in the fog. _A child._ Anna can get an impression of it without touching it, based on her senses only; the child is female, like her. Like her mother was. Like the forest and the Voice are.  
  
Anna trembles all over. She falls to her knees; she cannot hold herself up. She reaches for the child, who reaches back, tiny fingernails scrabbling against Anna's collarbone, seeking comfort, scratching trails on her skin. She feels the little legs lock around her rib cage, the warm weight in her arms. It has been so long since she has had this dream.  
  
The child clutches at her, whimpering. Anna tears the skirt from her sarafan and attempts to wrap it. Her shaking hands and the eternity spent unpracticed do not make it easy, but she manages it. She pulls the child back to her chest as the rain beats down on them both. It — she — does not seem completely alert, half-whimpering beneath Anna's tucked chin. It is so cold out here in the forest. Most of the time, Anna never notices. She notices now.  
  
She runs back to her sagging shelter as fast as she can carry herself. For once, it is not the bloodlust that drives her. It is a calling of something much more ancient and crucial.  
  
Once she is there with the child, Anna pulls the tablecloth free, knocking over the candles on top. She kneels before the hearth and sets the child down. It immediately stirs and begins wailing again, a sound that draws out a flow of frantic hums from Anna. She hates the sound of the crying. The crying always comes before bad things happen. It had come so many times before death had come to her door.  
  
Anna does not care to question her existence— the _why_ or _what_ or _how_ of anything that happens to her has never been less important. She is here because she is here and she does not ask why. But she still knows some things, implicitly, in the part of her that can remember the times before. One of those things it tells her, as stark as blood on snow, is that this, the place the Voice is, is not a place for children. There has never been a child in the fog before. It tells her that something has gone terribly wrong. It does not tell her how to understand it, or how to fix it.  
  
There is plenty of firewood stacked outside the cabin, and Anna goes to fetch it. It doesn't feel like she is doing enough. She manages to get a fire going, but the light is weak, and there is no dry kindling available. She looks around, and her eyes settle on the portrait on the mantle. A thing that shows her a picture of a past life that she does not recognize or remember. Sometimes, when she looks at it, there's an itch somewhere around her head. Not in her hair, but deeper, in the centre of her skull. She cannot reach it. It isn't a feeling that Anna likes, so she doesn't look at the portrait a lot.  
  
She pulls it free and splits glass from frame. She manages not to crack it as she sets it down far too roughly on the table. Her hands do not hesitate to tear the photograph apart, bringing it to her teeth to gain a better grasp on it. The handful of paper strips ends up in the fire, which immediately swells, accepting her offering.  
  
Anna pulls the child back into her arms and inches close to the fire. She is acutely aware of how cold the child is. She stares down at it cradled in her arms, at the dark hair curled on the forehead and the small fingers reddened by cold. The strength of its pulse detected by her sensitive ears ebbs and flows, weakens and rebounds as the fire warms them both. In the tiny face she sees the wan mirage of the ones she's lost before. So many of them, no matter what she'd tried. Over and over, she'd gathered the little girls into her arms and taken them with her, out of the last vestiges of their former homes, wanting to make them warm, keep them fed, alive. No matter what she had done, she would always lose them eventually. She thinks, in her uncomplicated way, that she has never carried something so heavy before.  
  
Time passes. It is not something Anna is aware of and never something she thinks about. The forest has no night or day; Anna rests only when she chooses. She has been here alone for many lifetimes, she thinks. There has never been a child before. She knows this. But does the Voice?  
  
Is it watching? Anna does not think it is able to see everything. Only the forest sees all. The Voice depends on Anna to retrieve prey so that it can remain powerful. It is not even half as powerful as the forest. The forest never needs to be fed; it always heals itself. The Voice is vulnerable in some ways. She is certain that she does not hear its whispers; it is not looking at her right now.  
  
Something tells her that she must not let it know about the child.

   
  


The child grows weaker. Anna needs to find something for it to eat.  
  
_Eat_ is a need that the Voice had taken away from Anna, but it seems to her that the child is shrinking into itself. She thinks that the rain has made it sick. Sick the way the others were, in the long, long winters, before the bad things had happened. Before she lost them. Anna has lost many. A pack animal by nature, her isolation is a survival skill forced by circumstance. What little she comprehends of this is that it means that she must be alone. And so she has been alone.  
  
But she must help. She must help the child. She _must._ It is an existential imperative that engulfs her soul.  
  
Food will cure. Anna knows this. She once survived that way. Life and death both begin in the stomach. To eat is to live another day.  
  
Anna offers the child cured meat, tries to shred it into fine little fibres that she holds up to its mouth. The salt and the texture makes the child cough violently, even with her offer of rainwater, and Anna is too frightened to try again.  
  
She leaves the cabin for a very brief, heart-racing period of time to seek out a crow. She knows that they are the Voice, but she also knows that crows are made of meat. It is not a challenge to capture one; she pins one to a tree with a hatchet on her first try. But when she walks up to yank it free of the trunk and examine it, the crow turns to ashes in her hands. It's an undoing of its very form, a collapse into a bloodless nothingness. She watches in silence as the ashes sift around on her palm and then evaporate up into the sky.  
  
When she returns to the child, she pulls it into her lap again and strips her blouse from her shoulders. She offers it her breast, despairing when it doesn't even try to lift its head to latch. This sets off a wave of fear, and Anna adjusts her position and tries again and again, rocking it and trying to hum a soothing lullaby with a voice that quivers. It will not work. She cannot help the child in this way. She does not know how to identify the emotion it makes her feel. It's a sort of regret and sadness and anger. It is an emotion Anna had forgotten long ago.  
  
The child's skin has a deceptively healthy glow in the firelight, but when Anna places her fingers to its translucent cheek, she knows better. It has begun to whimper more quietly and with less frequency. She does not know how long she has been trying to help it. In this place, where eternity passes in the blink of an eye, Anna feels something slipping away, a window in the midst of closing.  
  
She cannot ask the Voice for help. Anna knows the Voice needs prey. It exists because it must have prey. She must not give the child to the Voice. The child is not prey.

   
  


A shout from the rain.  
  
This time, Anna knows the scent immediately, as soon as she identifies it. Prey. She knows that the Voice did not put them here. Sometimes, they come to her forest even when the Voice does not ask her to kill them. They come here to pick its flowers and search her shelter for things they can use. She thinks that they are just trying to survive, like her. But she does not want them to come to her forest, whether the Voice has led them there or not, and she usually ends up stalking them until they notice her and run away in fear. A few times, she has really hurt them. Killed them, even. The Voice never seems to mind. The Voice simply brings them back like it always does.  
  
They are here. She does not know how many. It does not seem like a lot. She must not allow them to get close to the child.  
  
With reluctance and an uneasy hum, Anna places the child down on a bed of rags before the fire. It does not stir. She pulls the deerskin over her slim fingers and streaks a greasy toxin down the lip of her blades. And then, sure-footed, she runs out into the rain.  
  
Their scent is strong. She intuits that there are two of them. There is a male and a female, both of them hot with blood and tantalizingly vulnerable. She must not allow them to get any closer.  
  
She follows the trail through the trees. She sees that they are trying to be quiet, but they could never be quiet enough. The reek of prey is like a chain around Anna's throat, yanking her up to its powerful source. When she comes across them, they are not expecting her. They usually don't.  
  
She gets a basic impression of them. She recognizes them both. The one with the dark hair and the object over his eyes. And then the other— a girl. Or a woman. Something in between, just out of girlhood. She smells like both. But never enough to exempt her from being prey. Anna thinks she has been here for a long time, although there is no way to tell how long. She often enjoys hunting her. The female runs like she had been born to do so, like Anna had been born to hunt. She has given Anna victorious chases and ravenous losses. Anna knows that the female runs to survive, and she does, sometimes. Anna does not resent nor commend her for it. It is the way of things.  
  
With a snarl, she hurls a hatchet that just barely clears the space between the heads of the intruders.  
  
The two of them scatter instantly. The male gives a startled bark, and he nearly goes careening into the same tree her hatchet had just missed. The other human has predictably bolted. Anna keeps focused on the man. She lunges for him, giving a hiss that makes him curse in fear. He's trying to outrun her, turning heel towards the tree line. Anna knows she must follow them both until they are gone. She stays on the man's trail until his scent fades away, swallowed up by the fog. She does not proceed any further, because Anna does not care for what is beyond the fog. The voice had whispered that she could go see it at will, but Anna has never had a reason, nor desire, to leave her forest.  
  
Once the man's scent is gone, Anna concentrates on that of the female. The girl that runs. She is still somewhere within the boundaries of the forest. Anna follows her track.  
  
She finds the female when she picks up the sound of her panting and smells the metallic odor of blood. When Anna gets her eyes on her, she sees that the human is trying to bandage a deep wound on her knee. Anna thinks she got it while trying to flee. She seems to know that the blood will call Anna to her, because she appears frantic. The bandages are wet with rain and won't stick. The female's flame-colored hair is stained ruby with it, hanging limply on her shoulders and sticking to her creased forehead.  
  
Anna prepares to ambush her, but she remembers something. The bandages. The humans. She has seen them help one another. When the Voice makes her hunt, the humans sometimes bring hard red boxes with them that keep them together long enough to slip out of Anna's grasp. She had seen them with plants and tinctures and pastes, too. They are things that help the humans survive. She does not know how, but she has seen it happen.  
  
She stares from the shadows at the not-girl, not-woman. The Voice is not watching.  
  
When Anna leaps from the darkness to subdue the human, she puts up an instant fight, shouting and thrashing and kicking. The girl's muscular legs find purchase around one of Anna's thighs, and she nearly succeeds at toppling the both of them, but Anna's tremendous strength wins, as it typically does. She is the only apex predator this forest has ever known.  
  
The girl quits struggling when Anna has had her in a headlock for long enough. The moment the body goes slack in her arms, Anna hauls her up over her shoulder, locking an arm around her middle so that, when she comes to, her ability to struggle will be greatly inhibited. She hurries her capture back to the nest, the one source of warmth and light in all the forest, but it doesn't take long for the human to regain consciousness.  
  
"Hey—"  
  
A disoriented moan from behind Anna's back. The girl begins twitching. Anna grips her tighter, silent. They are almost there. Her legs are not tired, but they want to collapse. The girl begins to struggle properly just as Anna clears the doorway.  
  
"What are you— _no!_ Let me go!" The girl's voice has suddenly surged in alertness. Her knees dig into Anna's clavicle, and when she kicks, she throws Anna off-balance. She staggers in the entryway, a growl of displeasure surfacing from her throat. The human only struggles more, and Anna gives her a warning hiss, trying to swing her down so she can get a grip on her arms somehow. The girl shouts sharply when Anna attempts this, and she kicks her legs out again. Anna sways towards the wall. Her grip on the human loosens. There is another stab of urgency.  
  
She must communicate something to the human. To the prey. To the barely-girl who is afraid of her. Anna has to fumble for the word, try to remember how to shape her mouth and tongue to make the sound. " _No,_ " she says, finally, with some struggle. That's enough to make the human pause, and Anna takes advantage of this to push her against the wall, pinning her in place with a forearm. The girl tries to arch away, bleating, and Anna is frustrated. She is not trying to hunt the prey right now, but she does not know how to let the prey know.  
  
"Please," says the human. She looks so frightened. Her skin is mottled up close. It makes Anna think of patterns in bark and in leaves. Anna breathes out hard through her nose; the mask sends the warmth back over her cheeks.  
  
Another word. She must remember. Words were something her mother had given her. When her mother went away, so did the words. There was nobody left to say them to. But Anna knows she still has them, if she can only find them somewhere inside.  
  
"You," she finally manages. The human appears stunned, staring at Anna soundlessly. She has stopped trying to struggle, but she has not relaxed. Anna can sense the tension in every muscle of her body, pulled tight enough to snap. She's so small standing there tensed against the wall, dwarfed by Anna by several heads, looking both confused and fearful. But she will make the human understand. She knows she can. She very carefully pulls one hand away from where it is restraining the girl. When she sees no sudden movement from her, Anna points towards the fireplace. "Look," she says.  
  
_Look_ turns out to be the word needed to make the human understand. She looks. She sees the child. She gasps.  
  
" _Oh,_ " says the girl. Anna feels her muscles go all soft and supple in her grip. She's got the dilated, shining eyes of a deer. Anna can feel and smell, on her tongue, the rapidly stuttering throb of her heartbeat. "Oh."  
  
Anna does something she never does intentionally: she lets her prey go. Dropping her arms, she steps away from the human.  
  
The girl that runs does not run.  
  
Anna stares at her expectantly, and the human stares back. And then — slowly, very slowly — she turns her body, pointing stiff shoulders towards the fire and the impossible, fragile enigma set before it. Anna watches her closely. She sees the way the girl curls her fingers into her palms and forms two fists at her sides. She sees the reality of it all paling her skin to the color of the fog. She sees her hair catch the firelight. It becomes more like the firelight the closer the girl gets to it.  
  
She follows the human towards the hearth and the child. When the girl kneels next to it with a cry of pained wonder, Anna recognizes something in her response, but she does not know what.  
  
Anna kneels, too, lowering herself down on her haunches, hands on the floor to peer at the baby again. The girl immediately shrinks away from her, flinching. Anna stares at her from behind the mask, expressionless, feeling no determinate way. She has already given the prey time to run, and it had chosen not to. The girl is highly muscular, but small. She had been as light as a child in Anna's arms. She has the soft, blurry glow of newly born beauty and presence— a girl just steps into adulthood. Anna senses for the first time the depths of the human's fear of her. She can detect the racing heartbeat, the urge to flee. But the human, to her credit, stays kneeling there. Once she sees that Anna has not moved towards her, she settles again, leaning over the child, peeling apart the rags to get a look at it. When the girl exposes the weak pallor, the stark ribs, her face crumples the way the crow had in Anna's hands.  
  
"How?" says the girl. Anna does not understand how, or why the girl is asking when it is not important. She stays silent, tilting her head to one shoulder. The girl does not appear to expect her to answer, although her wary gaze keeps flicking back up to Anna. She's refitting the thin fabrics around the child, blanketing it tighter. The fire crackles. Anna can see a black stain forming on the floor beneath the girl's knee, which is still unbandaged. The girl hasn't seemed to notice. She's just staring down at the child with a numb expression.  
  
There is something Anna needs her to do. Something only a human like the girl can do. She needs to let her know. She tries hard to think of what to say. Her tongue feels like a piece of charcoal cupped in her mouth, dry and heavy.  
  
"Help," says Anna.  
  
A sort of realization dawns in the girl. Anna watches it spread across her face and detachedly contemplates the strangeness of being among another living being. She has not talked to anything in a very, very long time. So long that she doesn't remember when she last did. In isolation, Anna does not need to mind for anyone but herself.  
  
"You need my help," says the girl slowly. "Oh, my God." Her eyes bulge, and she presses a hand to her temple with an expression of shock. "You're asking me for help."  
  
That word seems important. "Help," Anna repeats, nodding. She hopes the girl understands. She thinks she does.  
  
"The Huntress," the girl murmurs, her lips parted in disbelief.  
  
Anna does not know what she is saying. The person that is Anna is Anna. Her mother had given her that name. It is hers; it _is_ her.  
  
"Anna," she says to the girl. She flattens a hand on her sternum, leaning in towards the human. "Anna."  
  
The astonishment blooms, peeling open on the girl's face, and then she says, slowly, cautiously, "Anna." And then she mirrors her, placing a hand on her chest, right over a rust-colored stain on her track jacket. "Meg." Her wide blue eyes do not leave Anna's masked face. "My name is Meg."  
  
Meg is the word for the human in front of her. Most humans have words for each other. Mothers give the words that mean names. Anna nods. "Meg," she says. It doesn't sound right, coming from her; nothing like the way the human had said it. She gives a huff out her nose.  
  
But the girl just nods. "Y...yeah," she says. She looks like she's having trouble accepting the situation before her. Anna detects the way Meg is holding her breath down in her stomach, can sense how uncertainty is rushing through her veins. But she also senses a sort of resoluteness, a decisive tightening in the air. "Okay," says Meg, exhaling long and slow. "I'm going to find a way to help you. For the baby." She adds the last part quickly, in a shaky but defiant sort of way. Anna gives an impatient snort through her nose and rocks back on her haunches; she does not care why the human helps, only that she does. She reaches out to the baby and strokes her hand over the rags idly.  
  
Meg gets to her feet, then winces, her leg buckling beneath her. She grits her teeth and manages not to fall, catching herself on the table. Anna stays where she is, watches her. Even standing, Meg is only a head taller than Anna kneeling on the floor. She's looking at Anna, tensing like she's expecting to be attacked at any moment, as she lowers herself into a chair. Anna observes her as she hitches her injured knee up to her chest and tries to dab at the bleeding with the sleeve of her already deeply stained jacket. It isn't very effective.  
  
The blood smell is thick and overpowering. A kill this easy to claim would have saved Anna's life in the times when she still needed to hunt to avoid starvation. Blood still draws her. It is an instinct impossible to ignore, begging her to seek it out. Even now, it bids her to come to it. Anna stops stroking the baby and ambles over towards Meg without breaking her crouch. Meg startles, the chair scraping back across the wood when she jumps. Anna clicks her tongue and reaches for her ankle; Meg's so much smaller that Anna's forefinger nearly meets her thumb around it. She feels Meg freeze up, but she doesn't kick. Anna tightens her grasp and drags her closer, chair and all.  
  
She examines the wound. It's a gash that's split the skin open right on the underside of Meg's kneecap, clean through her black leggings. It's fairly deep, and Meg is slim. Losing blood makes prey like her gradually weaker and weaker. Anna needs her to be able to run to help.  
  
Meg's eyes are on her, watching Anna peer at the wound. Her posture is stiff in the chair, her hands gripping the sides, her shoulders rigid. She's still watching as Anna gets up to pull a ragged curtain free from the wall before tearing off a strip. The worn fabric rips easily in her hands; it's old enough to be close to disintegrating. She tugs on Meg's ankle again, pulling her leg out straighter. She hears Meg swallow.  
  
Her calloused fingers are more accustomed to sharpening axes and ripping muscle from bone, but she pulls the bandage in loops around the wound, tugging it tight. This, too, is something her mother had shown her. Her body had once been all too fragile, so prone to injury. Once, she had known what it was like to be prey, but she does not remember any more.  
  
Anna settles back next to the baby without a word when she is done. But she is watching the girl closely, poised to pounce if needed. Now Meg must do what she said she would do. She must help.  
  
Meg has a bewildered expression on her face. Her coppery hair has come mostly loose from her braids, falling into her eyes. She looks over towards the hearth again, as if she needs to confirm once more what she is seeing. She gives her knee a little stretch, testing it out, and then she gets to her feet, experimentally shifting her weight from foot to foot. Her leg doesn't buckle this time. Looking flushed and slightly sweaty, Meg says, "I'll try to be fast." Although she looks anxious, her lips are pressed together tight, and her eyes are narrowed, like she's made up her mind about something.  
  
Anna does not know if she will come back. All that Anna has ever known prey to do is run away from her.  
  
"I'll be..." Meg starts, and then she seems to realize that Anna does not need her to say any words and does not know how to receive most of them, anyway. Meg gives her head a little shake, her hair whipping off her shoulders, and then, with one last look at the child, she dashes out of the cabin and sprints.  
  
Anna watches her go. She slips into the trees like a lost fawn, tipping away into the quiet of the darkness and the fog.

   
  


The baby is making little sounds of discomfort, pawing weakly and ineffectively at Anna's chest. She is laying curled up before the fire with the child pulled against her body. It is still trembling. It will no longer follow Anna's dancing fingers with its eyes. She curls around the baby, two fingers stroking its back, and imagines that she is shielding the flickering life force she feels inside of it.  
  
There is a whisper, faint, beyond the trees. The Voice is not calling for her directly, but she knows that it is near. Too near.  
  
Anna does not know what to do when, or if, the girl actually returns. She's not sure how long it takes, but soon she detects Meg's heartbeat on the very outer edges of the forest. It gets louder and closer and warmer until she can see her stealing out of the brush and rushing towards the dwelling.  
  
She's wet with rain, but the bandage is still tight in place around her knee, and she's carrying some kind of leather satchel. She gives Anna a careful scan-over, holding the bag out cautiously. Anna shakes her head. She does not want to use the human's things. They are not hers.  
  
"I brought everything I could find," says Meg. It seems like she's talking more for her own benefit, and Anna is indifferent to that; it is tolerable enough, so she says nothing about it. She watches Meg, dripping with rainwater, drop to her knees before the fireplace and open the bag. "I didn't tell anyone," Meg says as she reaches out to loosen the rags over the child. Anna stands over them both, staring down. "I... I thought about telling Claudette, but I didn't know if you would want..." She stops there, shaking her head, before staring up at Anna through her long lashes. She has an earnest and sweet face, but her eyes make Anna feel curiously sad inside.  
  
Meg lapses into silence and begins opening little bottles. Anna smells flowers and something sharp and sweet, and she stands nearby, craning her neck to try to pick apart the odors. She remembers, in the times when she needed to hunt to survive, that sometimes, when she searched their homes, she found that the humans kept stores of delicate glass containers. In them were things that kept pain at bay, a sort of unknown magic that frightened her to behold. The prey are gifted in a way that Anna is not, but the same is true in reverse.  
  
Anna watches Meg trying to coax the child into accepting the substance. She retrieves water in a pail when she notices that she is having some trouble. When she sets it down in front of Meg, the girl mumbles, "Thanks." She thins the mixture out into something she can dab on the baby's tongue using her fingers. The anxious tightening in Anna's gut has still not gone away. She rocks on her heels in place, the floorboards creaking. She growls and hums intermittently, watching the way Meg's body language changes when she does.  
  
Meg's hands delve back into the satchel one last time, and then she pushes it across the stones, away from her. Her hands rest limply on her knees, open-palmed, as if saying, _I've done what I can. She'd taken off her track jacket at some point and set it down by the hearth. Anna's eyes are drawn to the faint blue of the veins in her wrists._  
  
"You— we should watch her while she sleeps," says Meg. Anna can feel her studying her face, trying to search out her eyes behind the mask. Meg says more slowly, clearly: "We need to watch." She points at the child. Anna understands, but Meg does not need to tell her; she had not planned to break her vigil.  
  
She gets up, though, treading up the sloping stairs, following the threadbare carpet to the open-walled lookout. She gathers up an armful of hay and carries it downstairs, where she unceremoniously drops it to the floor. Meg, who has not moved from her position, scrunches up her eyes and sneezes. Anna ignores her, kneeling to spread the padding over the floor. She smooths the tablecloth over it, and Meg seems to get the idea. She puts the child down on the makeshift bed.  
  
Anna watches Meg, and Meg watches Anna, and they both watch the child. Meg continues to mumble occasionally to herself about how she doesn't understand why the Entity would bring a child to this place. The words are mostly meaningless to Anna, but she can infer the intent. They are questions she has not bothered asking. She does not have Meg's human thirst for answers to every part of life. There is only survival in any given moment.  
  
Some time passes, and Meg sways on the spot. Looking fatigued, she carefully lowers herself to the floor, on to her side. There's not much relaxation in her body; Anna can feel how uncertain she is as she continues to tamp down the impulse to take flight. But, gradually, she relaxes, tucking her arm under her cheek, her eyes on the humming fire. She curls into herself. She looks so small; it makes the child seem even more vulnerable there next to her.  
  
Something calls Anna down there to them. She shifts in spot indecisively before she curls up on the ground, as well, lowering her imposing form to the floor, blocking the light of the fire. Meg startles slightly, and she watches as Anna settles herself on the other side of the child. She continues watching, eyes widening, when Anna reaches up to tug her mask off. She does not wear the mask when she rests. It is the only time she takes it off.  
  
Meg's brows knit together as she stares, drawn to something on Anna's face. Anna thinks it might be her eyes. Sometimes, she catches a glimpse of herself reflected in the fog, or on the rocks. She can never see her own eyes. Her eyes had adapted to the darkness and had become darkness. She wonders what Meg is seeing on her face, but only briefly. It isn't something that matters.  
  
"You're a _person,_ " whispers Meg.  
  
Anna stares at her uncomprehendingly. A person. The word for herself. "Anna," she says.  
  
Blinking rapidly, Meg nods, quick little jerks of her chin. When Meg's hand drifts out, almost hypnotically, Anna tenses. She pulls her lips back defensively when the fingers come too close to her mouth, but Meg ends up brushing her fingers against Anna's temple, which feels strange, but not intolerable.  
  
There's a sad stirring in Anna's chest, a longing for something that never really was. Not knowing what else to do, she begins to sing. It's wordless, just sounds and vocalizations; the tune is the only thing she still remembers from her life before. The words had slipped away like the ashes of the crow a long time ago. But the words don't matter. The song is still a song. When she sings it, the remnants of those fading memories take on a gentle glow.  
  
Meg's eyes look watery. They're red underneath, the look of exhausted prey. It's surprisingly unpleasant to see. But then Meg closes her eyes, and Anna doesn't have to look at them any more. She's nodding her head gently where it's pillowed on her arm, self-soothing in a way that seems distantly familiar to Anna. She used to do the same thing, in her lost life. She would know that the hunger had become desperate when she could no longer even gather the energy to rock herself.  
  
Singing lets Anna's mind float away. Singing means tuning out the enticing call of her instincts wanting the prey's hot blood. It means not feeling sad in her chest. It means being with her mother.  
  
At some point, both the child and Meg are lost to sleep. Anna notices only when Meg's head tips forward. The weak little flutter of the child's chest takes on a cautious regularity. When she brings her fingertips close to its body, she can feel that something inside has grown warmer. She stops singing then. The song is not always for herself.

   
  


The forest tells Anna to wake up, the wind outside imploring her to come to attention. She opens her eyes before the human does, and she immediately sits up to examine the child. It has recovered some color, but the little brow is still furrowed in discomfort. Anna gets up to tend to the dying fire, fetching wood to work it back up to a roar. As she does, Meg wakes up. At first, she looks lost, like she's forgotten where she is, but then she seems to ground herself, her jaw shifting tightly as she checks on the child, as well.  
  
"So far, so good," she's muttering. Anna has tuned her out. As she picks up her mask, her ears are trained on something else.  
  
The Voice. It whispers to her, _Come to me._ It is a gentle, seductive whisper spoken in a nonexistent language, and yet it demands deference and complete, immediate compliance. Anna has never had reason to disobey— not because she is a servant, but because it is of no consequence to her at all to do so. It had given her her forest; that has been enough reason to obey. But now...  
  
Anna lifts the mask up, but then she stops before abruptly lowering it. She doesn't know why. Meg's watching her, in the midst of pulling her jacket on.  
  
"What's going on?" Meg ventures, looking like she's ready to pull the words back at any moment should they disturb or anger Anna. She's combing her fingers through her loose hair, pulling it back to tie it up.  
  
The Voice whispers, louder, _Anna, come._  
  
She must acknowledge it. It knows something. Anna's knuckles crack against the edge of the table where she's gripping it. She must tell it what she has done, and it will claim the child, because it feeds on hurt. She knows this. It's an uncomplicated enough thought that even her instincts understand it perfectly. It's what she's thinking of as she opens a locker, pulling forth her axe.  
  
Anna will not feed the Voice this time. She knows it will not be happy.  
  
Meg's gathering the child up in the blankets. She seems to have seen something in Anna's body language. She bundles the baby up tightly and slips the satchel over her shoulders before sweeping the baby into her arms and straightening. Anna turns to look at her, a girl holding an even smaller girl. Just prey to the Voice. The both of them. It dawns on Anna for the first time that there is no difference between them, the child and the girl. The human.  
  
It's more than not feeding the Voice this time. Anna realizes that she must never feed it again. Not if it would harm a child here, in her forest. Her sanctuary has been violated; poison has found the roots.  
  
She will not hunt for the Voice. But she knows that she can make it hunt for her.  
  
"Meg," says Anna.  
  
The Voice whispers, swelling between her ears, _Anna._  
  
A sort of haze begins to encroach in her vision, pulling at the sides of her mind, darkening the world before her. The Voice is making its presence more known. She can feel it.  
  
"Yes?" says Meg. She's rolling her ankles, like she's ready to run. Good.  
  
There's a word that Anna needs to use. A word that means safety, shelter. Protection. Concealed in the dark. The soft pocket of tranquility Anna used to find in the spot between her mother's neck and shoulder, night after night, huddled together, keeping one another alive.  
  
"Hide," she says.  
  
Meg's fear is sour in Anna's mouth. She has become aware of the Voice, too.  
  
"I will," she blurts out, wild-eyed. She takes a couple of unsteady steps forward and tightens her hold on the child, who is awake and whimpering. "I'll bring the baby back to the others and... We'll find a way. I promise."  
  
Anna does not know what she means, or what _I promise_ is, but she sees that Meg knows that she must run. Anna trusts her to do it.  
  
Meg gives her a regretful, lingering look, as if there is more she wants to say. Anna can see the flowery blue pattern of her sarafan spread brightly around the delicate burden in her arms. And then Meg turns and runs— faster than Anna has ever seen her go before. It is a wonder to behold, and there is no time for her to behold it. It's only moments before the fog has swallowed them up, and just as soon after that, it damps away even the scent of them, too.  
  
The Voice has risen to a grinding cacophony of displeasure deep in Anna's head. She will not go to it, and now it seems to know.  
  
What she does is climb to the roof of her cabin, hand over hand, scaling the wooden logs with familiar ease, ignoring the splinters that dig up into skin that won't break. She pulls herself up to the roof, feeling the unstable sway of it beneath her sensitive feet. Once she has climbed as high as she can, she tips her head up to the sky and enjoys the feeling of the rainwater washing over her bare face.  
  
The darkness creeping into her vision thickens. It hardly matters. Anna knows how to move in the dark and the fog. Her mother had shown her. She will show the Voice, now, too. She will run at death the way her mother did. The Voice will make it difficult, but it will never be able to make her hunt for it again. It can do as it will with her.  
  
Her beloved forest, recreated around her in so much painstaking detail, appears to shimmer before her eyes, blurring into a dreamlike mass of dull color. For a last look, it's one that leaves only a ghost of an impression. She thinks about how the Voice had allowed her to live within it indefinitely, impossibly. But Anna knows that no forest, and no God, and especially no mother, is deathless.  
  
She waits until the black miasma blots away everything around her, even the rain. Suspended within it, Anna listens to the Voice pitch up in fury; it does not like its blessings rejected. She reaches sightlessly down to her side, where her axe is holstered in its familiar spot over her hip. She pulls it free, and then, without contemplation or pause, drags the blade across her gut, between her groin and her navel, spilling the blood needed to call the Voice directly to her for her judgment.  
  
Anna remembers — it was so long ago, that little girl's life — asking her mother about death only once. She does not recall much of the answer. Anna no longer even knows her mother's face; when she tries to think of it, there's just a dull impression of light. But she does remember one thing. Her mother had described a paradise, just beyond a gate. They would need only to cross it. One day, she promised, they would get their turn, together.

**Author's Note:**

> I am pretty new to this fandom and mostly unfamiliar with it, so I encourage and appreciate any comments, critique, or questions. 
> 
> I can also be found on Tumblr [here](http://raycats.tumblr.com).


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